Story by Alexandra Fuller ~ In the Shadow of Wounded Knee ~ After 150 years of broken promises, the Oglala Lakota people of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota are nurturing their tribal customs, language, and beliefs. A rare, intimate portrait shows their resilience in the face of hardship.

How the Pine Ridge Community Storytelling Project Beganby Aaron HueyIt all started when an envelope full of letters arrived in my mailbox. They came from high school students at the Red Cloud Indian School after they had seen a photo story of mine on Pine Ridge in 2009. Their letters challenged me to see a different side of the Reservation.

As a photojournalist who has been working on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation for the past 7 years, I’ve always struggled with how to share the incredibly complex story of this community. I’ve never been able to tell all the stories that I want to tell on Pine Ridge, and I’ve come to realize that even if I could, I can’t tell them the way the people want them told.

To solve this dilemma, I joined forces with web pioneer Jonathan Harris, the creator of cowbird.com—a visionary, embeddable, storytelling platform. Together we built this community storytelling project so that the people of Pine Ridge could author their own story. This new relationship between the story subject and the publication opens up a new kind of transparency and dialog rarely seen in mainstream journalism today.

A letter from Red Cloud Sophomore Charlie Cuny was particularly moving, and helped Aaron Huey to see ...... according to Charlie ... family's like hers are rarely (if ever) included in media articles, because she thinks their story lacks the sensationalism that drives most coverage of Native American reservation life. (below see Charlie Cuny Letter)